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Here, gathered in our beloved South Dakota, are a few members of our Williamson / Mattson Clan. Charles and Luella are to be blamed (be kind, they didn't know what they were doing). We're generally a happy bunch and somewhat intelligent (notwithstanding our tenuous grasp on reality). I'm also proud to say that most of us still have our teeth.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

A 14th Great Grandmother, Anne, Duchess of Exeter, and Her Two Husbands. Williamson Line

From the Fortress of Solitude
Pleasant Grove

Hello Williamson's
Tonight we read about a 14th Great Grandmother, Anne Plantagenet. She was quite the woman and older sister to King Edward IV.

Anne,
Duchess of Exeter, was the oldest of the children of Richard, Duke of
York, and Cecily Neville. She was born on August 10, 1439, at
Fotheringhay—the same castle in which her youngest surviving sibling,
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, would be born in 1452. In 1446, when she
was six, she was married to fifteen-year-old Henry Holland, who would
shortly become the second Duke of Exeter. The Duke of York offered a
large marriage portion—4,500 marks--probably because Henry VI was
childless at the time, putting the young Henry Holland in line for the
throne. Only 1,000 marks of the portion were paid. It was a poor
investment in any case, for Exeter proved to be solidly Lancastrian. He
also seems to have been exceptionally quarrelsome, falling out with his
father-in-law and with all manner of people during the 1450’s and
serving time in the Tower. Among those with whom he seems not to have
gotten on well with was his own wife. The couple had one child, Anne
Holland, but evidently lived most of their lives apart.

Exeter
was attainted in 1461 and eventually joined Margaret of Anjou in exile
abroad. Meanwhile, the Duchess of Exeter was granted the duke’s Holland
inheritance for life. For a brief time beginning in 1464, she had the
custody of the nine-year-old Harry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a ward
of the crown. Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville later that year.
Probably around Easter 1465, he transferred Harry to the care of his
queen, whose youngest sister Harry married.

The Duchess of
Exeter’s young daughter, Anne, had been promised in marriage to George
Neville, a nephew of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick. George at the
time had the potential to be a quite wealthy young man, as the Earl of
Warwick had no sons and the Neville lands were entailed in the male
line. Elizabeth Woodville, however, wanted the heiress Anne for her own
eldest son, Thomas Grey. She paid the Duchess of Exeter 4,000 marks to
break the contract with the Neville family. This was certainly sharp
business practice on the queen’s part, but it was hardly unusual for the
times: rich young heirs and heiresses were hot commodities. Certainly
Elizabeth could not have made the arrangement without the approval of
Edward IV, the Duchess of Exeter’s brother. The Duchess of Exeter was no
less keen to look after her own interests than the queen: as part of
the marriage arrangements, the Holland inheritance was settled on little
Anne, with a remainder interest in the duchess herself and in the heirs
of her own body.

During the Readeption of Henry VI in 1471, the
Duke of Exeter moved back into his London house of Coldharbour, which
had been granted to the Duchess of Exeter during his exile. Probably the
Duchess of Exeter prudently took herself off to one of her other
residences during this period.

The Duke of Exeter fought with the
Earl of Warwick at Barnet in 1471. There he was badly injured and was
left for dead on the battlefield until a servant discovered signs of
life in him and took him to a surgeon. He was later smuggled into
sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, but Edward IV removed him and imprisoned
him in the Tower of London. While her husband was still a prisoner, in
1472, the Duchess of Exeter took the opportunity to have their marriage
annulled. Presumably the Church did not recognize allegiance to the
house of Lancaster as a basis for an annulment, but the actual grounds
are not known.

The duchess soon remarried. Like her brother the
king, she married a social inferior—in her case, Thomas St. Leger, a
knight who had probably been her lover for some time. As Anne Crawford
notes, Edward IV had been showing St. Leger a great deal of favor for
many years, including a substantial grant of eight manors in the early
1460’s. He was no gigolo, however; he served Edward IV militarily and
administratively for years.

In 1474, the duchess’s child by the
Duke of Exeter died, triggering the duchess’s remainder interest in her
lands. The following year, Edward IV set off on an expedition to France,
which ended in a peace treaty instead of the anticipated military
engagement. Anticlimactic for most people, the expedition was fatal to
one—the Duke of Exeter. He had been released from the Tower and allowed
to join the expedition, presumably so he could prove his loyalty to the
king in battle, but on the return journey, he was drowned. Whether his
death was accidental or murder is unknown, though rumors of the latter
abounded.

The Duchess of Exeter, meanwhile, had a daughter by
Thomas St. Leger in late 1475 or in January 1476. The little girl, named
Anne like her mother and her deceased half-sister, soon became
motherless, for the duchess died in January 1476, possibly in or soon
after childbirth. She was buried in the Chapel of St. George at Windsor.

Following
his wife’s death, St. Leger remained on good terms with his
brother-in-law the king. He served as Edward IV’s controller of the mint
and as master of the king’s harthounds. In 1481, he was granted a
license to found a perpetual chantry of two chaplains at the Chapel of
St. George, in memory of his wife. He never remarried.

Thomas
Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, who had married the Duchess of Exeter’s
eldest daughter, Anne Holland, had remarried after the young girl’s
death and now had a son of his own, who was contracted to young Anne St.
Leger. The arrangement under which Anne was be deemed the heir to the
Exeter estates was formalized in an Act of Parliament in January 1483.
Richard Grey, Dorset’s younger brother, also benefited from the Act, in
which part of the Exeter inheritance, worth about 500 marks, was set
aside for him. The loser in this transaction was Ralph, Lord Neville,
who was the heir of the Holland family, although since the Duke of
Exeter had been attainted, the crown had some justification in treating
his inheritance as it liked.

This arrangement fell apart when
Richard III took the throne in July 1483. Thomas St. Leger attended the
new king’s coronation and was given cloth of silver and velvet for the
occasion, but he was soon afterward deprived of his positions of master
of harthounds and controller of the mint. His daughter, meanwhile, was
ordered to be handed over to the Duke of Buckingham. Perhaps, as Michael
Hicks has suggested, Buckingham had the girl in mind as a bride for his
own eldest son. This never came to pass either, of course, for both St.
Leger and Buckingham ended up in rebellion against the new king.

St.
Leger has been criticized for his lack of loyalty to Richard III, but
Richard, having removed him from his offices, had given him no reason to
remain loyal. Moreover, St. Leger had been unshakably faithful to
Edward IV and, like many of the other rebels, was undoubtedly distressed
at Edward V having disappeared from sight after having been deprived of
his crown.

Unlike many of the rebels, who gave up the fight
after Buckingham’s execution on November 2, St. Leger continued the
fight in Exeter, but was ultimately captured. He was executed on
November 13, 1483, at Exeter Castle, despite the offer of large sums of
money on his behalf. St. Leger, described by the Crowland chronicler as a
“most noble knight,” was buried with his wife Anne at Windsor. They are
depicted here:

One
last bit of business remained: the disinheritance of Anne St. Leger. In
1484, Richard III’s only Parliament overturned the acts under which
Anne had been declared the heir to the Exeter estates. The beneficiary,
however, was not the Exeter heir, Ralph Neville, but the crown itself.

Poorer
but still well connected, Anne St. Leger ultimately married Sir George
Manners, Lord Ros. Their eldest son, Thomas Manners, became the first
Earl of Rutland. It is this earl’s countess who is credited with telling
the supposedly sexually naive Anne of Cleves, “Madam, there must be
more than this, or it will be long or we have a duke of York, which al
this realm most desireth.”

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Tracing one's genealogy can be a tricky endeavor. Once you move past three or four generations, the information you discover on the internet may or may not be accurate. What you read on this blog represents the best I've found using Ancestry.com, The LDS Church's Family Search, and Google. Corrections are gladly welcome. Please send your information to AnAmericanDynasty@gmail.com

I'm interested in information on two family lines in particular.

I'm searching for our Vercellino family from Northern Italy and our Mattson /Tornberg family in Sweden. Again, you can reach me at AnAmericanDynasty@gmail.com